I'd been meaning to get around to reading this book for years (and [b:Cryptonomicon|816|Cryptonomicon|Neal Stephenson|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514E9A0MPEL._SL75_.jpg|1166797] too) and I'm glad I finally did. Pizza delivering Samurai, skateboarding delivery girls, the Mafia, a bad guy with an aircraft carrier instead of a lair - what's not to like. So, it's a sci-fi novel, but it's also a thriller - bad guys versus good guys (helped out by goodish guys). Surprisingly, the Mafia turn out to be the goodish guys in this one. Underlying these stories is another whole plot line about language, religion, the tower of Babel and neurolinguistic programming. Heavy stuff for a sci-fi book that started out life as a planed graphic novel instead.

I've always suspected that a good indicator of how well a sci-fi book is liked by the computer crowd is how widely the language is picked up and reused (stolen). While a large part of the language of Snow Crash was made up slang, terms like Metaverse and Avatar have cropped up time and again since.